‘Baby Falak’ Chapter 3: The Runaway

[This Wall Street Journal reconstruction is running in serialized form. A new chapter will be posted each day this week on India Real Time. Read Chapters One, Two, Four, Five and Six.]

Sanjit Das/Panos

“Gudiya” means “Doll” in Hindi.

Advertisement

It was the nickname of a tiny 14-year-old girl with a light complexion, long black hair, a round face, and eyebrows set ever so slightly toward the sides of her face. She was given the name by the people who sent her to have paid sex with men in neighborhoods on the fringes of South Delhi over five months, starting in June last year.

**

Hanuman statue

Govindpuri is a messy, broiling neighborhood that has little to distinguish it aside from a temple with a gigantic statue of the monkey god, Hanuman. It doesn’t display the signs of India’s economic growth that neighborhoods just one rung up do. It feels like a place you drive through and don’t bother to look around.

As a small child, Gudiya lived with her mother, Pushpa, and an uncle. Her father, Jitender Gupta, says he was imprisoned after being convicted of murdering a relative in 1998.

After Mr. Gupta, 40 years old, was released in 2004, the family moved together to Govindpuri, to a quiet side street not far from the clogged traffic and honking horns around the Hanuman statue.

In 2005, Gudiya’s mother died from tuberculosis. Mr. Gupta had to raise their daughter alone.

Jitender Gupta

He is a hawk-like little man with forearms so wiry that his veins look like a topographical map. He worked long hours selling cucumbers, eggplants, beans and other vegetables from the roadside near the Hanuman temple.

He struggled with Gudiya. He beat her with his belt and fists, his daughter has told authorities. His response, in an interview: I didn’t. But if I did, it was for her own good.

Their relationship became so sour that Gudiya was put in an orphanage. She said in a police statement that her father put her there. Mr. Gupta says Gudiya’s aunt deceived him into it. Either way, the orphanage was convinced she was parentless. Gudiya stayed for three years.

The orphanage was, in its way, a refuge. Gudiya later told counselors that she was hit hard once on the leg with a stick as punishment after she accidentally opened a bathroom door that hit another girl’s head. But, overall, she said, she saw no signs of serial abuse.

“The girl said that the hostel is a safe place,” according to a later counseling report. (That report and others were provided, in redacted form, by Delhi’s child-protection agency.) Officials from the orphanage didn’t return calls seeking comment.

When she was roughly 13, Gudiya had had enough. She walked out. She bounced around various relatives before she returned to her father.

Govindpuri market

They lived in a neighborhood close to Govindpuri called Sangam Vihar, where the streets are lined with banana sellers, shoe repairmen, pastry sellers and women collecting water in large jugs. It feels like a small rural town, one of hundreds stitched together to make Delhi.

At a crossroads, up a short flight of stairs, Gudiya and her father – plus Mr. Gupta’s new girlfriend, a woman named Geeta – lived in one room. It is about 10 feet square, with painted blue walls, a glassless window and a wooden door. It cost 1,000 rupees ($18) a month to rent.

There was close-quarters friction. Mr. Gupta asked his daughter to call Geeta “Mommy,” Gudiya said in a court statement. When she refused, she said her father beat her. Geeta split. And on May 26, 2011, saying she feared violence when her father came home drunk, Gudiya, aged 14, took off, too.

Her first stop, according to a statement she later gave before a court: the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, a top government research hospital, where Geeta worked. (Geeta could not be reached; a judge earlier this week asked police to produce her in court.)

The older woman took Gudiya to see a woman called Pooja Pandey back in Govindpuri. They were acquainted: Ms. Pandey knew Gudiya and her father because her husband also ran a vegetable stall in Govindpuri. Gudiya stayed.

But the couple didn’t tell Gudiya’s father where she was. A few days after his daughter fled, Jitender Gupta went to the police and filed a missing person report.

**

Pooja Pandey viewed the young girl as a possible wife for a nephew of hers in the town of Etah, in Uttar Pradesh, the giant, ramshackle state that borders Delhi to the east. She tried to talk Gudiya into the marriage. She balked.

Ms. Pandey presented her with a choice, according to a statement Ms. Pandey later gave to police: “You either marry with our nephew or do prostitution.”

Gudiya was silent, according to her own later statement to a judge.

That night, Ms. Pandey and her husband, Sandeep, took Gudiya to Mr. Pandey’s village, according to versions of events provided by Gudiya as well as police statements by the Pandeys. The couple could not be reached for comment.

There, Gudiya saw a young woman about her age who was married to an older relative of the Pandeys, according to her statement. The young woman’s husband and mother-in-law used to beat her, Gudiya says. She told Ms. Pandey, according to the statement: “I’ll do whatever you say but I won’t marry.”

That night, Gudiya was given bitter, white alcohol to drink. Then Mr. Pandey took her to the roof of the house, made her undress and told her to lie down. Ms. Pandey held Gudiya’s hands. Mr. Pandey undressed himself and raped her, according to both women and Mr. Pandey’s police statement.

The next morning, the husband and wife returned to Delhi, leaving Gudiya in the village. A month later, Gudiya joined them in Delhi. Mr. Pandey raped her again, repeatedly – and with his wife’s knowledge – over three days, according to all three. The couple brought other men to her as well, and charged them each 500 rupees ($9), according to the Pandeys’ statements and Gudiya. Gudiya later told a counselor that there were other young girls working at the house, according to the counselor’s report.

Engaging in prostitution is not illegal in India. But related activities, such as soliciting and running a brothel are. Having sex with a minor is considered rape.

Around August, Gudiya was subcontracted out for one week to another couple who ran a prostitution racket, Ms. Pandey’s statement said. The deal was that Gudiya was to have sex with seven men a day for seven days, Gudiya later told a counselor.

She also told the counselor that when the woman of the house realized how young she was, the number of days was reduced to four. Gudiya said she had sex with all types of men, young and old, in their houses and in hotels.

**

Mohammed Dilshad’s house

Mohammed Dilshad was one of the drivers who took her from appointment to appointment, he later told police.

He is in his early 30s, clean shaven, about five-foot-five. He wears his hair long and slick, parted in the middle and brushed back. He was an auto-rickshaw driver successful enough to upgrade to two taxis – a Hyundai Accent and a Maruti Zen – and to hire a part-time employee.

That employee was Manoj Kumar Nandan, the man who did odd jobs at Laxmi Devi’s house in Uttam Nagar. Mr. Dilshad heard from Mr. Nandan about the little girl in the house who was available. Mr. Dilshad and his wife took the baby and called her Falak. They started raising her as their own daughter.

But Mr. Dilshad and Gudiya also hit it off, according to statements made by both.

**

After her contract was over, Gudiya returned to stay with Pooja Pandey. She told a counselor she earned 20,000 rupees ($360) in four days, but saw none of it.

One night, Ms. Pandey, who was pregnant, got labor pains. She told Gudiya to accompany her to hospital. There, while Ms. Pandey was being examined, Gudiya slipped away, according to the statements both made to police.

She returned to the house where she had just been and started working again as a prostitute, her statement said. She saw Mr. Dilshad again. The girl “had started liking me and I had also trapped her in my love,” he later said in a statement to police. They began an affair, they both confirmed in statements.

He installed Gudiya in a rented room in his neighborhood. She took clients to make some money. On Nov. 15, Mr. Dilshad’s wife, after a quarrel with him, left for her parents’ place in Mumbai. Around that time, Mr. Dilshad and Gudiya performed a marriage ceremony in a temple, even though he remains married to his wife. He called himself “Rajkumar.”

“After marriage, I didn’t do prostitution nor did Rajkumar tell me to do prostitution,” Gudiya later said in her court statement.

Around the new year, he brought her Falak, she told a counselor. The baby had been staying at his home. Then Mr. Dilshad moved Falak and Gudiya to a guesthouse in a neon-spattered hotel district by the Indira Gandhi International Airport. Soon after, Mr. Dilshad left for Mumbai to see his son, leaving Falak and Gudiya alone.

At first, Gudiya enjoyed it. She felt Falak was “so sweet little baby,” a counseling report said. The kid slept well at night and didn’t create problems during the day. In the mornings, Gudiya bathed her then fed her breakfast – bread, butter, biscuits, snacks, milk and tea. She fed her biscuits during the day and cooked rice and lentils at night. She kept her in Huggies diapers. If they needed supplies, Gudiya said she called for delivery or popped out to a local store. Falak played in the room by herself, according to a counseling report.

But each day that passed brought them closer to the events that would pitch them into leading roles in a nationally-televised drama.

There is an old woman who still lives on the same side street in Govindpuri where Gudiya stayed when she was younger. “She was a nice girl,” the woman recalled. “She was fine.”

When asked how she felt about Gudiya today, she replied: “What can I say? You know what happens to a motherless child.”

**

Tomorrow: A disastrous night and a Good Samaritan land Falak in the hospital and Gudiya in trouble with the law. On Monday, you’re invited to join a live chat with Paul Beckett and Krishna Pokharel as they discuss the series, the social issues raised, and the individuals profiled herein. Ask questions now, and join us on Monday.

**

[This story was compiled through dozens of interviews, court documents, police records, medical records and counseling reports. Several of the principal characters are speaking here for the first time. Living minors are identified by their nicknames to protect their identity in accordance with India’s child-protection guidelines. All photos are by Krishna Pokharel and Paul Beckett unless otherwise specified.]

About India Real Time

India Real Time offers analysis and insights into the broad range of developments in business, markets, the economy, politics, culture, sports, and entertainment that take place every single day in the world’s largest democracy. Regular posts from Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires reporters around the country provide a unique take on the main stories in the news, shed light on what else mattered and why, and give global readers a snapshot of what Indians have been talking about all week. You can contact the editors at indiarealtime(at)wsj(dot)com.